One of the points to consider when making changes to cached files, is that the browser won’t know to download the modified file without being prompted to re-fetch the manifest file.

A common workaround is to make some change to the manifest file to force an update, typically using a version number. This works fine in most instances, but Firefox stubbornly ignores this. The usual workaround for Firefox is to set the manifest file to expire by using the following rule in the .htaccess file.

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<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/cache-manifest "access plus 0 seconds"
</IfModule>

While this works, it’s not much good if your’re not using Apache, or if your host has blocked .htaccess usage.

However, you can achieve the same effect by setting the HTTP headers in PHP. Put the following lines in to top of your manifest file, and change the extension to .php.

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<?php
header("Content-type: text/cache-manifest");
header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Expires: ".date(DATE_RFC1123));
?>

The first line sets the content type to text/cache-manifest, this is a requirement for manifest caching to function. The second tells the browser not to cache the file. And in case the browser ignores that, the third line expires the file immediately.

Now the browser will keep the manifest cache up-to-date, but still cache the files you want.

I’ve written a raplet which displays data from an LDAP directory next to a message thread in GMail. The records are matched against the email address (mail attribute). The data that is returned is easily configurable at the top of the script.

You can get hold of the file on gitHub.

Google Reader

I keep an eye on a lot of blogs, mostly design/science/art focussed. Typically I’ve got about 100 feeds in my feed reader, but I’ve had a bit of a purge recently, and chopped it down to about 30. I use Google Reader to keep track of them all, sorted in to various tagged groups (Graphics, Science, Paper Craft, Comics etc..).

I tend to read through one group at a time, toggling the Expanded or List views depending on which group I’m reading. Expanded view is best for the graphics feeds making it easy to quickly scan through the images, picking out interesting pics. I prefer List view for text articles where I tend just to scan the headlines.

Tumblr

For a while I used to keep a photo album as a scrapbook of various images from magazines and what-not. As I tend to browse more articles online than off these days the photo album has become a bit redundant. For a while I kept printing off images and sticking them in, but this process was too cumbersome to keep up with.

Now I use Tumblr as my scrapbook, combined with a Firefox plugin and an Android app, I can quickly and easily add inspiring images to my collection.

In Firefox I use the Tumblr Post plugin. With this I simply right click an image and select ‘Post photo to my Tumblelog’. I copy and paste the page link (for reference) in to the comment field and hit upload.  Update: There’s actually a plugin setting that sets the image link to the page URL, no copy and paste needed! Easy as.

On my mobile phone (HTC Hero running Android) I have the Asuka Tumblr app, which allows me to send any image on my phone straight up to Tumblr. I can use this to take photos of things I see and stick them straight in to my scrapbook.

Twitter

I love Twitter. It’s awesome. However, managing followees and keeping an eye on conversations takes a bit of work. Lists and Saved Searches are the answer. I’ve got a number of lists grouping the different people I follow, and I take a gander at each on a semi-regular basis.

I’ve also set a few custom searches for words and phrases I’m interested in. Twitter search accepts logical search constructs, so I can search for "paper engineer" AND "paper engineering" in one go. This is a good way to find other people talking about things I like to talk about.

Incidentally, I’ve tried, but not really got on with any of these social network aggregation programs, I’m much happier with the good old Twitter site itself.

Follow me on Twitter
Check out my Tumblr Scrapbook

I wouldn’t expect that apps made using App Inventor would be better (faster, more efficient) than their hand-coded equivalents, but I can see that this would be useful for quickly knocking up a demo or for scratching out ideas. It’s clear from the blabber that Google aren’t trying to put developers out of work, this is aimed squarely at educators as a platform to teach about programming concepts. A good thing in my books.

Google will be granting access to App Inventor over the coming weeks, you need to register to get an invite.

Custom Post Types

The introduction of custom post types is a feature that many WP users have been waiting for for a while, now it is here it is awesome. I’ve created a custom post type (‘papertoy’), and extended it with custom meta fields, to make managing my paper toys far easier than before. I may write a post with more detail on this some time.

Editable Menu

WP 3 allows menus to be managed in a wonderful interface in the admin console. Posts, pages, categories, etc, can all be dragged and dropped around to create a menu hierarchy. And it is incredibly easy to code in to a theme.

Widgets

Ok, these aren’t new. But as of WP2.8 there has been a new widgets API, which makes the creation of widgets a billion times easier than it was before. I’ve created two widgets for this new theme; one with links to my social network accounts, and another to display my latest paper toys.

The paper toys widget basically pulls an image (stored in a meta field) from each of my ‘papertoy’ posts and displays it with a link to the page itself.If you’re planning on doing something similar yourself, you may to check out this problem (and fix) when using the WP loop with the new widgets API.

The social networks widget is pretty simple, I may publish it in the future, but right now I’ve got other things going on. Oh, the icons I used are from here.

When using the following code, inside a widget, to return posts from a custom query, you’ll find that the post title and perma-link are returned, but the post ID is not.

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<?php $loop = new WP_Query($query);
while ( $loop->have_posts() ) : $loop->the_post(); ?>
	<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">
        <?php echo $post->ID.' : @; the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Adding a global call to the $post variable at the top of the loop fixes this issue.

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<?php $loop = new WP_Query($query);
while ( $loop->have_posts() ) : $loop->the_post();
	global $post;?>
	<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">
        <?php echo $post->ID.' : @; the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endwhile; ?>

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while read LINE; do
   echo $LINE
done < $0

Rather handily the highlighter script has been wrapped in to widget (several actually) for easily jamming in to WordPress.

Laters!

P.S. That script is my attempt at a Quine, a cheat I know, but it was the first code sample that jumped in to my head while I was writing.

EDIT April 2011: I’m now using a different plugin for syntax highlighting

These incredible images have been captured by a brain acanning technique called DTI (Diffusion Tensor Imaging). Essentially DTI uses an MRI scan to track the flow of water in nerve cells, these images here show the white matter connecting the grey matter in a schitzophrenic’s brain.

Link to Paper

Also, the paper is hosted on Scribd, a site which allows free access academic papers. I’m going to have to check this one out…